Re: CHAT: XS vs. Kirshenbaum vs. Who-knows-what

At 01:48 26.1.2004, Trebor Jung wrote:
>Merhaba!
Vertu saell!

>I find XS and KB etc. very very ugly!
The problem is that different things are ugly
to different people.  I for one think kosher IPA
is rather ugly, since I detest arbitrarily modified
letters, while I have no problem in principle
with lots of diacritics, or with the use of *actual*
Greek letters.  I know that many disagree with me, though.

>I mean, why the numbers
>and punctuation except because we're stuck with them?
Basically yes.  I too have problems with the use of
numbers (for other things than tones), while I feel OK
with the use of punctuation as modifiers (only too bad
there are so few punctuation characters!), which again
reflects my taste for diacritics over modified letters.

>Why not use, say, bh for /B/, lh for /K/, ng for /N/,
>ngg for /ng/, nq for /N\/, zh for /Z/, gh for /G/...?
I suppose that your taste is influenced by the fact that you
have to use voice reading software (is that the word?), and
want something that your software can make some kind of sense
out of, but IMHO digraphs (trigraphs, n-graphs -- I prefer to
call them "polygraphs") are extremely ugly -- *especially* the
arbitrary use of +h to indicate all manner of fricatives for
which the Latin alphabet is deficient!  Moreover polygraphs are
inherently ambiguous: is 'th' a dental fricative, an aspirated
top or is it an extention of Pinyin conventions and stands for a
retroflex stop?  So you would again need e.g. to insert
punctuation to disambiguate!  Some twelve decades ago Henry Sweet
tried to construct a phonetic notation which limited itself to
those signs that could be found in an ordinary English printshop,
so he had to take recourse to digraphs quite frequently.  His
compromise solution was to use italic letters as strictly
defines modifiers, so that all digraphs consisted of one roman
letter followed by one or more italic letters.  Not beautiful
IMNSHO, but at least disambiguated.  Now the ASCII equivalent of
that would probably be to use uppercase letters for basic symbols
and lowercase letters for modifiers.  Just as ugly, but at least
unambiguous.  Alernatively you could put some punctuation character
either after each entity, or just in ambiguous cases.  Is there any
punctuation character that your reading software would simply render
as silence?

>That's why I would like to create a uniform and more
>less ugly and tidier system...
I guess everyone would applaud uniformity, but ugliness
and tidiness are subject to taste, and tastes differ, not
least depending on our practical needs, goals and necessities.
I'm lame, so I would like to have a keyboard where I would need
no modifier keys, since holding down a modifier key while pressing
another key is often strenuous to me.  In particular I loathe that
a lot of punctuation and bracket characters are in shift or AltGr
positions on my Swedish keyboard.  When I still used a Macintosh I
had a plugin that allowed me to define abbreviations for any words,
which would then expand on the fly.  Since it speeded up my typing
considerably I miss it sorely!  So I can sympathize with you, but I
do not expect everyone else to accomodate to my particular tastes or
convenience (like letting go of all capitalization in ordinary text, or
to put up with my fumbling typos).  Of course you are free to come up
with and use whatever suits your needs, and I encourage you to do so
especially for the con-orthography for your langs, but don't expect
everybody else to switch over to -- or even bother t learn -- any
new ASCII phonetic transcription you come up with.  Others have tried
and failed, you see.

>And vowels could be
>marked for frontness, roundedness, and all that with
>the punctuation;
The problem is that if you write a particular sound frequently
you are likely to want a simple symbol for it, while you will
put up with more kludgey symbols for less-often used sounds,
but what sounds are frequent or infrequent depends on what kind
of language you are transcribing.  To take but two examples:
in English dental and palatoalveolar fricatives are all over
the place, so to those who frequently transcribe English it makes
sense to use capital T D S Z for these sounds, while someone working
with IndoAryan languages or Swedish would prefer to use these capital
letters for retroflex sounds.  Likewise front rounded vowels may seem
like exotica to you, whose complicated articulation warrants a complicated
transcription, but in most Germanic languages front rounded vowels are
quite simple sounds that are used all the time!

>  the numbers could be used for tones...
On that one I agree fully with you!

IMHO it would be fun to come up with a transcription
which used only the lowercase a-z letters and those
twelve or so characters which can be more or less
genuinely regarded as punctuation, but I don't think
it would be easy.


/BP 8^)
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X)
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